Drop City

he got comfortable behind it he pushed himself up and changed the record, a little rock and roll to shake things up, _Excuse me while I kiss the sky.__ But Bill, the big overblown Freedom bus–riding sack of suet and hair, Mr. Downer, said they had to conserve the battery and switched the thing off, and then he was back out in the cold, thinking Star, thinking Merry, thinking Lydia.
    The thin crust of snow cracked under his boots like gunfire. It was colder now, the moon haunting the sky and the stars scattered in its wake like pustules on a broken-out face, and he had no illusions about Star, or Merry either--but Lydia, at least Lydia was mad for him, always had been, right from the first. She wasn't his type, of course, but it had been a long dry stretch living like a combination lumberjack/monk at Bosky's, humping wood, hunting, keeping the stove going when Joe was out cruising the empyrean in the Cessna. They'd brought two Indian chicks in one night and for a drunken day or two they'd gone through all the permutations, and that was all right, he wasn't complaining--or maybe he was. This wasn't what he'd signed on for, no way in the world, and if he had the bucks he'd be out of here in a heartbeat--for the winter, at least. Hawaii sounded nice. La Jolla. Ensenada.
    Star's cabin was the one on the end. There was a dogtrot to break the wind, a pair of windows glowing, a curl of smoke from the stove. He stood there outside the door a minute, wondering if he should knock or what, and then he pushed on through the dark closet of the dogtrot and gave two raps at the cabin door. Nothing. He rapped again. Heard voices, the shuffle of feet. Then the door creaked open on its hinges and Marco was standing there in his bleached-out jeans and workshirt, looking noncommittal, looking stiff and unwelcoming, and there was no love lost between them, not since the pot incident, anyway, and the only thing he could think to say was “Trick or treat.”
    Star's voice rose from the depths then. “Who is it? Ronnie? Is it _Ronnie__?” And then he heard a squeal from Merry, or maybe it was Lydia, and a long sustained jag of laughter from all three of them, as if the very fact of his existence was the funniest thing in the world. Marco gave him a nod and the three women, exuding the close, compacted odors of the sheet, the blanket, the nightie--the odors of the flesh--were there at the door in their sweatpants and sweatsocks, cooing their greetings. “Come on in,” Star insisted. “Jesus, don't just stand there--”
    Inside, it was close as a prison cell. You could put your fingertips on one corrugated wall and practically reach across to the other. It was dark, hot, dry. The two built-in bunk beds dominated the place and you had to crouch to avoid the six hundred tons of crap hanging from hooks and lines strung across the room, wet socks and underwear, parkas, jeans, boots. Incense was burning. The stove glowed. There was a little table by the front window littered with cards and books and dirty plates and he fell into the chair Star pulled out for him and jerked off his gloves while the chicks hovered over him, three pairs of breasts at eye-level and their lit-up faces beaming down on him like alien probes searching for signs of life. “I can't believe it,” Merry kept saying, and Jiminy was there too, he saw now, looking daggers from one of the top bunks.
    Pan shrugged. “Hey, it's Halloween,” he said by way of explanation. “I thought I'd stop by. See what's happening.”
    Nobody could argue with that, and pretty soon the three women were crowded in at the table with him, sharing a plate of sugar cookies with orange sprinkles baked specially for Halloween, firing up a joint, passing round the warmed-over jar of homebrew while Marco and Jiminy conversed in a low murmur from the upper bunks. Lydia was wearing a fur coat that fell all the way to the floor--“Cross fox, given to me by an admirer; you like it?”--and she was looking good, beyond good, and hadn't she lost some weight, was that it? “You look dynamite,” he said, and he had an arm round her shoulder.
    “Whoa, listen to Pan,” Merry giggled. “Been without it too long, huh? Living like a what, like a goat, out there with Joe Bosky? What about me? Am I looking dynamite?”
    She was sitting knee to knee with Star and they were doing each other's faces up for what was going to have to pass for Halloween, slashes of black down the bridge of the nose and across